The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  There were, furthermore, previously unobserved features of the church of Saint Francis that interfered with the realization of Alberti’s design, as if the church itself was intent upon obstructing his grandiose project. There were buttresses protruding from the west front, for example, that interfered with the two niches intended for the bodies of Malatesta and Isotta. The original rectangular design for these niches would expose these ancient buttresses, and Alberti advised de’ Pasti to make the niches round so that the buttresses would be concealed. But de’ Pasti soon realized that this solution raised its own problems. The sarcophagi would not fit into round niches and would protrude from the face of the building. In the end it was decided to abandon the niches on the west facade altogether, and to place the tombs of Malatesta and Isotta inside the church. The arrogant condottiere now lies in an obscure corner just to the right of the main door.

  All along, the project was plagued by Alberti’s absence. Ever fearful of losing Malatesta’s confidence, he wrote:

  If someone will come here [to Rome] I will do my best to satisfy my Lord. As for you, I beg you to consider [all this] and listen to many and let me know. Someone might say something worthwhile. Commend me, if you see him, or write to him, to my Lord to whom I would like to show my gratitude. Commend me to the magnificent Roberto and monsignor the protonotary, and to all those you think love me.

  All these difficulties are of the very stuff of architecture, today as in the fifteenth century; but the construction of the Famous Temple of Rimini also encountered problems beyond Alberti’s design. Quite simply, Malatesta did not have enough money to complete the project. De’ Pasti tried to save good facing stone to economize but, even so, not enough material could be had. Rather than send to Istria or Carrara for limestone or marble to be hewn from the ground, Malatesta started to take stones from the Roman harbor of Rimini—not only a revered ruin but also the city’s prime economic asset. Indeed, one scandalized citizen wrote, “Wherever there was some noble stone that could be used for decorations or inscriptions,” Malatesta took it, “to the great detriment of the city’s ancient monuments.” He induced the abbot of San Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna, built by the very Justinian who had made Hagia Sophia, to sell him chunks of his abbey; and the abbot sent him cartloads of porphyry and serpentine, which now adorn the arch around the west door of Malatesta’s temple. The people of Ravenna were so outraged that they canceled all the contracts they had with the condottiere and called upon Venice to defend their honor.

  The demigods of Alberti’s dream had constructed rafts of learning from the flotsam they found in the River of Life, and now the Famous Temple of Rimini was being constructed by lashing together the relics of ancient buildings. The humanist had not envisaged that the construction of his classical masterpiece would be so destructive to the remains of antiquity he himself had sought to preserve.

  MALATESTA WAS AN increasingly desperate man, and his enemies were multiplying by the day. In 1458, the new Pope Pius II engineered an alliance against him; its forces marched on the Rimini hinterland, capturing fifty-seven villages and executing all those who did not surrender. The next year Malatesta pawned all his jewels to raise troops and went into rebellion, laying siege to several papal towns. One of his paid humanists, Valturio, defiantly compared him to the “Divine Vespasian who built and completed the temple of Concord and Peace”; but by 1461 Malatesta was confined to Rimini, while in Rome the pope convened the trial of his soul.

  The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The Curia deposed Malatesta from his principality, excommunicated him from the church, and condemned him to hell. He was burned in effigy at the cathedral doors of countless Italian towns. The Venetians, who thought he might come in useful to them, eventually negotiated a pardon for Malatesta, but he was required to fast for three days and then to kneel before the papal legate in the forum at Rimini to beg forgiveness.

  Malatesta’s final campaign was far from his ephemeral principality. Three years after the condemnation and the pardon of his soul, the Venetians sent him to Greece to fight against the Turks. In the hills above ancient Sparta he found someone he had not thought he would encounter again: Gemistos Plethon, the Greek scholar whose paganism had so inspired him in his youth. Plethon was dead. Malatesta had his men collect the philosopher’s bones and he shipped them back to Rimini, where they were placed in one of the side arches of the Famous Temple that Alberti had reserved for the remains of famous men.

  The temple remained unfinished. All that was ever built of the dome were a few foundations. At the west end, the high tribune arch that was perhaps intended for Malatesta’s own monument was never completed. The brick facade of the old church of Saint Francis still pokes through the hole where the tomb should have been. The sarcophagi that line the sides of the building remain half empty, Malatesta having been unable to gather around him the requisite number of famous men to fill them. The stone arches that house them peter out toward the east end, revealing the brick of the medieval structure they were built to conceal.

  Malatesta died in 1468 of a malaria that he had picked up in Greece. Seven years later, the bastard who succeeded him, Roberto, celebrated his wedding. The centerpiece of the table was a gigantic cake covered in sugar icing, made in the form of the Famous Temple of Rimini as his father and Alberti had imagined it. It didn’t outlive the feast.

  ALBERTI, SAFE IN the papal circle, escaped the demise of his patron. He soon moved on to other projects in Florence, Mantua, and Rome; but none of Alberti’s buildings was ever finished. They are as incomplete today as when the builders walked away from them, as ruined as the remains of antiquity Alberti sought to emulate.

  Alberti had hoped that his buildings would be perfectly beautiful. When, in his dream, he stood atop the mountain and saw the gods flitting above the River of Life, he dreamed that he was one of them. He was punished for his blasphemy. The Famous Temple of Rimini, his statement of classical perfection, is nothing more than an incomplete sentence, a non sequitur, a stutter.

  Sans Souci, Potsdam

  In Which Nothing Happens at All

  CLASSICAL RUINS

  View of the basin and the ruins at the top of the hill opposite

  the palace of Sans Souci. Engraving by Johann Friedrich Schleuen, c. 1775.

  SIMULATION

  One of the first tasks faced by the new Greek nation in 1833 was to invent its own history. The Greeks acquired a king and discussed turning the Parthenon into his residence. The design that Karl Friedrich Schinkel prepared for this palace was a collage of classical buildings clustered around their prototype, the Parthenon. The latter was left in ruins as a memento mori, to remind the young nation that all civilizations will fall into ruin one day. Schinkel’s design simulated a Greece that had never existed. His palace was, like The Architect’s Dream, a history lesson, offered to a nation that possessed no history of its own.

  The Famous Temple of Rimini and the Alhambra were battlegrounds between the past and the present, the familiar and the other. There was no question in the minds of Alberti and Keiser Karel about which side to be on or, indeed, who was going to win. The course of history defeated them both, and the Famous Temple and the Alhambra are no more perfect than all those other virgin shrines and temples to wisdom whose wrecks litter the history of architecture. Any architecture that aspires to completeness will eventually fall into what is, in the terms of its creators, lamentable decay and ruin.

  Any architecture, that is, other than that of gardens. There, in the bosom of Natura Naturans, it has always been permitted to enjoy, rather than defy, the passage of time. At no period was this truer than in the Enlightenment, when Edward Gibbon was inspired to write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by gazing at the ruins of the Roman Forum and hearing the Franciscan friars sing the vespers on the site of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. His readers, men of taste and learning, would while away the boredom of their summer’s ease by building follies, and these whimsical belvederes an
d ruins displayed precisely the altered states that architecture had traditionally sought to defy. They were, like The Architect’s Dream, objects of speculation, miniature simulations of the processes of history, to be viewed from the summit of a colossal column, at a distance, without care.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, when the world was without care, there was a lake in a forest. The lake was still and dark, and was guarded by tall poplar trees; and by the side of this lake, the people of that country had made a shrine to the nymph who dwelled there. It is still there: a little niche in a wall, down by the water.

  One day a wandering prince came upon this lake and this nymphaeum, and he made a garden; and in the garden he constructed two shrines: one to his father, the king, and the other to his mother, the queen. In time, the Greeks added a temple to this garden shrine; and in time the sanctuary was surrounded by a Doric colonnade.

  In time the sanctuary must have grown wealthy, for the Romans built a complex of baths there, in which pilgrims to the sacred spot could refresh themselves. In the atrium there was a bath of Russian jasper, presided over by Apollo and Bacchus. In the next room, light and rainwater poured from the sky into an impluvium framed by four Doric columns; and in the third, all the things necessary for the bath were laid out on bronze consoles cast in the form of dragons. The golden gates of the calidarium would open in the aqueous gloom, and the pilgrim would descend between white marble caryatids into radiant steam.

  It must also have been the Romans who added the arched gateway to the sanctuary, perhaps in the turbulent times of their decline and fall, for it is a crude structure, clearly built for defense. It was extended in the Dark Ages with a fortified Norman tower. In time the sanctuary fell into decay, and a farmhouse was constructed under the defensive aegis of the tower. This farmhouse is one of those ageless buildings that characterize the campagna: little more than a barn rendered in ochre, it is pierced with round-headed windows in the manner of the Tuscan quattrocento. Above the house proper there is a gallery under a pantiled roof, in which the cooling airs can be taken and the crops hung up to dry. To one side, a lean-to in the same style indicates where, in prosperous times, the farmer’s family extended their dwelling.

  These peasants were ignorant, no doubt, of the finer architectural points of the sanctuary whose remains they inhabited. With delightful insouciance they tethered their pigs and cattle against an ancient wall, and in order to provide themselves with a shady place to rest they made a loggia. They took the Doric columns that had once surrounded the sanctuary and placed them on top of the wall. Dispensing with the capitals and the frieze (now lost), they used their new colonnade to support a trellis for vines; and where this canopy required additional support, they propped it up with two wooden herms that they had found on the site.

  And then the peasants who lived here gathered the remaining fragments of the sanctuary and used them to ornament their loggia. They took a Corinthian capital and turned it into a table; they took an ancient sarcophagus, broken as it was, and made it into a fountain, into which a bronze fish still dribbles cooling water; they set an old basso relievo into the wall and placed a row of architectural fragments on the seat they had made around their table. And then, in the heat of the day, they rested.

  It is a placid, timeless scene; but to those who would look for them, this complex of lake, temple, bath, tower, and farm is also an encyclopedia of all the styles of architecture. And since the history of the art of building is nothing more or less than the progression of style from one generation to the next, this humble home is nothing other than a history of architecture, written in crumbling brick and cracked mortar. Here, in one spot, had been a garden, the first of human habitations; simple shrines, which in time became the opulent temples of a great empire; and the refined monuments of antiquity, which fell to barbarism and were replaced by the crude dwellings of peasants. The chronicle of civilization is always such a story, of origin, establishment, construction, elaboration, and decay; and there can be no more powerful exposition of the cycles of history than a collection of buildings of many different dates, differently advanced in their artistry and in diverse states of ruination.

  In between the wandering prince, in his innocent state of nature, and the peasants, in theirs, had passed centuries; and it might be observed that both the prince and the peasants lived at times when the fortunes of civilization were at their lowest ebb. But the peasants possessed something that the prince did not: they had, however imperfectly, a memory, and, what is more, something to remember. Nothing is ever forgotten. Each cycle of history begins in advance of its predecessor: lessons, whether historical, technological, philosophical, or artistic, are learned that cannot be unlearned or lost. Thus we can speak of progress in civilization.

  KARL FRIEDRICH SCHINKEL leaned back on his sunny bench beneath the vine-clad trellis, and he picked up his glass of wine from the top of the antique Corinthian capital. It was, as ever, a charming story, told by a charming storyteller. One of his friends later recalled: “There was a nobility and harmony in his movements, a smile on his lips, a clarity in his brow, a depth and a fire in his eye . . . but still greater was the power of his word, when that which moved him came unbidden and unprepared to his lips. Then the doors of beauty opened.”

  But Schinkel had not had to say a word. All he had done was to gesture, for the tale was all around him. Indeed, he was in it: sitting in the very same loggia, in front of the old basso relievo and the other fragmentary antiquities of his story. It was a tale told in crumbling brick and stained ochre, assembled from shattered marbles, and hung with vines.

  And the even more wonderful thing was Schinkel had invented it all. The lake was no more natural than the spouting fountains, and the ancient garden shrine no more primitive than the parterres of the palace gardens. The temple was no more Grecian and the baths no more Roman, the tower no more Norman and the farmhouse no more Tuscan than the barracks of Potsdam. The place was called Siam, and its ruined fragments and crumbling walls were fourteen years old at the most.

  Karl Friedrich Schinkel was in the habit of conjuring fantasies. The sets he designed for The Magic Flute, in which the Queen of the Night rides a crescent moon through a galaxy of stars, are still used today. His Panorama of Palermo offered up a view of that city taken from a terrace at evening time, while his spectacles of the burning of Moscow and the Battle of the Nations inspired terror and awe in those who saw them. Their fame quickly reached the ears of the king and queen of Prussia, who graciously engaged him to work for their family.

  The bedroom he designed for Queen Luise, painted the most delicate shade of pink and hung with translucent muslin, evoked the delightful sensation of wakening at dawn in a gauzy tent. For her husband he made a replica of the Villa Chiaramonte, which the king wished to recall from a happy trip to Italy. Without even having seen the villa, Schinkel re-created it so convincingly that the king declared himself transported to the sunny Bay of Naples. For Karl and Wilhelm, the cadet princes of the family, Schinkel constructed another Italian villa, the Schloss Glienicke; and, facing it over the wide river Havel, the Gothic castle of Babelsberg, set high on a steep and wooded hill. But it was in Siam that Schinkel realized his most subtle flight of fancy—one so surely founded in history and philosophy as to be almost completely believable.

  Alexander von Humboldt, who was sitting in the same dappled shade, was delighted with Schinkel’s story, for it closely modeled his own thinking on the history of nature. As he would put it:

  The description of nature is intimately connected with its history; and the geologist, who is guided by the connection existing among the facts observed, cannot form a conception of the present without pursuing, through countless ages, the history of the past. In tracing the physical delineation of the globe, we behold the present and the past reciprocally incorporated, as it were, with one another; for the domain of nature is like that of languages, in which etymological research reveals a successive development, by showing us the primary co
ndition of an idiom reflected in the forms of speech in use at the present day.

  Schinkel’s tapestry of light and shade, garden and interior, land and water expressed perfectly the natural philosopher’s belief that nature and culture were not in opposition, but were, rather, symptomatic of—and sympathetic toward—each other.

  Alexander von Humboldt was even more delighted that he had been invited to live in the farmhouse at Siam whenever he wished, and to use it as if it were his own. Humboldt never felt at home when he was at home. His scientific expeditions to Latin America and to Russia and his diplomatic and professorial visits to the capitals of Europe should have satisfied his wanderlust, but they only made him hungrier. To stay in Schinkel’s confection would be to taste something of the joys of travel without any of its inconveniences: to recline under overgrown pergolas, in sight of Tuscan farmhouses, without actually having to go abroad. And here, free from the cares of city life, he could think, and write, and converse with wise and civilized men.

  The prince of Siam completed the small party that sat on the bench in that sunny afternoon of May 1840. He felt every bit as pleased with himself as his learned and august friends, for that long postprandial ramble through tall tales and elevated conversation was as much his creation as theirs.